Resolutions

On New Year’s Eve I plugged in my external hard drive for the first time since 2007. The goal was to back up everything on my computer but the result was somewhat different. Amongst the OU assignments and general day to day backups I found two things that took up most of my afternoon and have stayed on my mind fairly constantly since. The first was a folder entitled ‘My Stuff’, now this is not an unusual folder name for me, I have the same title in my photos and my email to store the random stuff that may at some point prove to be useful. Fully expecting it to be another folder of once important but now irrelevant information I figured there was time for a quick browse before deleting it. Instead I found an entire folder of poetry and essays from the height of my teenage desperation. Most of these are dated around 2000-2001, years which proved to be somewhat pivotal to the course of my life. It was decisions made in these few years that permanently altered the course of my future.



Until then it was expected that I would pass my exams and follow my bother and cousins from 6th from to university, instead I ended up helping to care for a dying friend, eventually dropping out of 6th form after changing schools and re-doing my first year and most significantly moving out of home a few months after my 18th birthday. In fact the exact date I made the decision to move was the 4th January and by 2pm on the 5th I was all moved out and getting settled in to my new house. Looking back at those poems it is clear to me quite how damaged I was at the time. I remember the sense of desperation, the feeling that nothing I could ever do would be good enough and that sooner or later everyone and everything would leave me. It was the battle I fought every day, sometimes the act of writing, the permanence of something being written down was enough to help. Some days it was I all I could do to stay alive. Finding that writing has shown me quite how far I have come form that terrified, grief stricken, depressed teenager. Life is not and will not ever be an easy ride and I know that the choices I made then will be with me for the rest of my life but that is ok. I dropped out and moved out. I learnt to take care of myself in the good times and the bad. I survived minor surgery, ending up in a wheelchair and major surgery. I had my heart (and teeth) broken and I learnt to love myself just a little. I often think back and remember how far I have come but seeing my writing from that time I now know with certainty that I have never really had before that the distance between 17year old me and 27year old me is far greater than I understood. I made it, I have been to hell and back a few times over and while I’m a little bruised and battered I made it, I’m stronger for it and I wear my battle wounds with pride because I was there, I went through it and came out the other side. I hit the bottom and found my way back up with a lot of help and support but I did it.

The second thing I found were my pictures from Switzerland. The day I arrived there I decided that I would try to take a picture from the same window once a month for the entire time I was there. I have 6months worth of pictures and not all of them show the same view but they do show me something I had forgotten. Switzerland was a lot of things to me, including the loneliest and most beautiful place I had ever experienced but above all else it was a place where life really was about me. Now I definitely had my hands full with two small children and a tri-lingual household, during my working (and often non working) hours there was no end to what I was expected to do, from cleaning the flat to rocking the baby back to sleep at 4am. But in the middle of it all there was just me. During my time off I was free and clear and able to do whatever I chose whether it be sitting in my room watching it snow and reading or taking the train further up the mountain and hiking back down through the woodland. Living abroad is an experience like no other, you can move to a different city or county leaving your family behind. Start a new job and get used to a new town but there is always the consistency of language, of knowing that even though you can’t just pop to your usual pub or shop you can pick from hundreds of other shops and pubs who will be selling basically the same things. When you move to a new country that kind of consistency just doesn’t exist. I think that during my time out there I found maybe two brands that we get in England (and I’m fairly sure I found those on one of the monthly shopping trips to France...). The first time I went to a pub I was lucky enough to be with another English lady who had been in Switzerland for a couple of years. I pulled out my best (school taught) French and ordered a glass of wine. My friend gasped and rattled off various instructions in a strange hybrid language I barely recognised (it was Swiss French which bares as much resemblance to French as Swiss German does to German-basically not a lot!). It turns out that a standard glass of wine in a Swiss put is unfiltered meaning all the nasty stuff that means you have to decant really expensive red wine hasn’t been filtered out at all. There are two problems with this, firstly it makes your nice fresh white wine taste awful and secondly it raises the proof rather drastically which is not generally a good thing on a January night having already failed the test of getting into the pub without falling on the black ice (I may have fell twice that night but they were the only two ice or snow related incidents I had in the six months).

Anyway, needless to say moving to a different country is a daunting experience; I was unlucky enough to live just inside the French quarter of Switzerland a few miles from the German quarter with an Italian family so the languages enough were enough to turn my brain to mush on the best days. However there is one part of living abroad that is somewhat incredible, I have said that it was one of the loneliest times of my life, in fact I cried from homesickness every day for the first two weeks. Regardless of that the kind of solitude I experienced was somehow liberating. I had responsibilities, two very small, very energetic, very cute responsibilities, but I also had a certain degree of freedom that I had never experienced before. I could go and do whatever I felt like with no need to ask permission, let people know or feel obliged to take another person’s feelings into account. For the first time it was just me and I had to make the decisions, there was no one to follow or obey, it was just me. This knowledge was unbelievably liberating and allowed me to come to terms with a lot of the hurt, disappointment and anger from my past. I found myself spending 6 hours swimming up and down the heated Olympic sized pool just thinking and looking at the lake and the mountains. It meant I could jump on a train and go hunting for a waterfall or walk to a ridge near my house and look down at Lake Neuchatel. The majority of my weekends were spent with a loaf of the local Swiss bread (which I have craved constantly since) a bottle of water and a can of cannabis tea jumping on trains and exploring new places. But more than that, for the only time in my life I was alone and able to spend my time exploring not just the Swiss mountains but myself. Through those days and weeks and months of loneliness, despair, exhilaration, exhaustion and euphoria I learnt more about myself than at any other time.

The theme of my two discoveries on my external hard drive was definitely learning and surviving. Whether it be the death of someone close to me, the daily struggles of family life, the frustration of learning something new or the pain of being alone I lived it and survived it. Life is full of highs and lows and the ability to adapt and adjust and develop coping techniques that allow you to carry on is what lets you do more than just survive, its how you learn to live. I have many goals for this year, the most important of which has for quite a while been to get through surgery and learn to walk again. This is still an important goal but now I have two more that while seeming less important and probably at times tedious are equally as important to me. Firstly I want to get back to the place where I could vent my feeling by writing. I need to express my creativity and exercise my emotions and not let them shrivel back into a bottle to be stored up and ignored. Secondly I want to go back to Switzerland. I want to spend some time on those trains, get back up that mountain and really think about who I am, where I’ve been and where I’m going. So in a few months when I get frustrated about the slow progress with my knee and the tedium of writing down and expressing my frustration I will look back at this. It may now be this year but I will get back up those mountains, I will probably not go alone but I will be able to experience the peace of simply being back up among the trees and the waterfalls. Heidi was right, there is just something peaceful and safe about the mountains and in so many ways they are the reason I can stand up with confidence today and say I am good enough, I will get there, I will not be beaten. So these are my ‘resolutions’, a term I have never used before, this is my goal for me and for the me who will look back in ten years and wonder at how far she has come since writing this. This year I want to rediscover me, I want to explore more of my creativity and more of my technical skills. I want to learn things and teach things. I want to feel confident in myself and with myself and I want to take the time to go back and look at where I come from and how I made that journey.